17 Of The Most Powerful Excerpts From Poetry

I have chosen some of my favourite lines of poetry to celebrate World Poetry Day, which is celebrated on 21 March each year. These are lines that I find powerful, moving and poignant.

Please share yours in the comments section below.

17 Powerful Excerpts From Poetry

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
~Mary Oliver
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes…
~Lord Byron
He was my North, my South, my East and West.
My working week and my Sunday rest.
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song.
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
~W.H. Auden
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
~W.B. Yeats
Dying is an art.
Like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I have a call.
~Sylvia Plath
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
~Dylan Thomas
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all
~Emily Dickinson
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
~David Whyte
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
~T.S. Eliot
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain.
~Edna St. Vincent Millay
so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.
~Pablo Neruda
I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me.
~Charles Bukowski
to live in this world
you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go
~Mary Oliver
I carry your heart with me (I carry it in
my heart)I am never without it (anywhere
I go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
~ee cummings
As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.
~Anne Sexton
We were so wholly one I had not thought
That we could die apart. I had not thought
That I could move,—and you be stiff and still!
That I could speak,—and you perforce be dumb!
I think our heart-strings were, like warp and woof
In some firm fabric, woven in and out;
Your golden filaments in fair design
Across my duller fibre.
~Edna St. Vincent Millay
I carry you with me into the world,
into the smell of rain
& the words that dance between people
& for me, it will always be this way,
walking in the light,
remembering being alive together
~Brian Andreas

This article has 40 comments

1. Joys that Sting (I can’t choose an excerpt -it’s the poem as a whole that’s so striking):

Oh doe not die, says Donne, for I shall hate All women so. How false the sentence rings.

Women? But in a life made desolate It is the joys once shared that have the stings.

To take the old walks alone, or not at all, To order one pint where I ordered two, To think of, and then not to make, the small Time-honoured joke (senseless to all but you);

To laugh (oh, one’ll laugh), to talk upon Themes that we talked upon when you were there, To make some poor pretence of going on, Be kind to one’s old friends, and seem to care, While no one (O God) through the years will say The simplest, common word just your way.

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day

So live that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan that moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him and lies down to pleasant dreams.”
– William Cullen Bryant, Thanotopsis

Breathes there a man with soul so dead
who never to himself hath said:
“This is my own, my native land”?
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned
As home his footsteps he hath turned,
from wandering on a foreign strand?
If such there breathe, go mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power and pelf,
The wretch concentered all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
to the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For u remembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before;
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
Edna St. Vincent Millay

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
Kipling

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Wordsworth

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so…
Donne

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

BY ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

When did it become so gray
Now winter, no more summer’s day
The rose so pink and deeply red
Once danced around inside my head
With shimmering colors, vibrant, bright
Has somehow turned to darkest night.
Alas how once the sun did shine
To warm the flower and the vine
My thoughts return to yesterday
When we use to run and play
Where hope, the ember, warm and bright
Could still drive out the darkest night.

There lies the port, the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have tol’d and wrought, and thought with me-
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads – you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
-Tennyson

My favorite one is from William Wordsworth’s Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood:

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;

Another of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poems, “The Coin” contains the words:
“Oh better than the minting of a new crowned king [a coin]
Is the safe kept memory of a lovely thing.”
The poem itself is short, but very pithy.

The Neruda-Bukowski-Oliver sequence is quite moving.
When I thought of what lines move me, I realized many come from the lyrics of our greatest songwriters. A few examples:

Like your smile
And your fingertips
Like the way that you move your lips
I like the cool way you look at me
Everything about you is bringing me
Misery.
—Bob Dylan

Once I was your heart’s desire
Now I am the ape hunkered by the fire
With my knuckles dragging through the mire
You float by so majestically.
You’re my north, my south, my east, my west
You are the girl that I love best
With an army of tanks bursting from your chest
I wave my little white flag at thee.
—Nick Cave (perhaps in response to Auden?)

It was deep into his fiery heart
he took the dust of Joan of Arc
and then she clearly understood
if he was fire, oh, then she must be wood
I saw her wince, I saw her cry
I saw the glory in her eye
Myself I long for love and light
but must it come so cruel, and oh so bright?
—Leonard Cohen

Oh the last I heard she’s sleeping rough back on the Derby beat
White Horse in her hip pocket and a wolfhound at her feet
And they say she even married once, a man named Romany Brown
But even a gypsy caravan was too much settling down
And they say her flower is faded now, hard weather and hard booze
But maybe that’s just the price you pay for the chains you refuse
Oh she was a rare thing, fine as a bee’s wing
And I miss her more than ever words could say
If I could just taste all of her wildness now
If I could hold her in my arms today
Well I wouldn’t want her any other way
—Richard Thompson

Arithmetic Arithmetock
I turn the hands back on the clock
How does the ocean rock the boat
How did the razor find my throat
The only strings that hold me here
Are tangled up around the pier
—Tom Waits

Oh Amanda, I have lived Auden’s poem, and will never more give of myself 100%. One of my favorite poets the start of just one of his songs…

Anthem by Leonard Cohen

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don’t dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.